A Portage County judge sentenced a 43-year-old Euclid man to 30 months in prison for a police chase through Mantua that ended with his car slamming into another vehicle, injuring the woman behind the wheel. Richard J. Lewis was sentenced during a hearing on Monday, more than a year after the crash that set his case in motion.
Portage County Common Pleas Judge Laurie Pittman handed down the sentence and also suspended Lewis's driver's license for seven years, according to the Record-Courier. The judge further ordered Lewis to pay $300 in fines, $425 in court costs and $500 in restitution to the woman he struck, the paper reported.
The case traces back to the evening of May 12, 2025, when Mantua police stopped Lewis's car after seeing it leave a McDonald's parking lot on Main Street because of an equipment violation, per the same account. After officers asked him to get out, Lewis took off.
A Chase That Ended on Foot
Lewis fled at a high rate of speed once officers tried to stop him, and he soon crashed into another vehicle, injuring both himself and the woman driving it, the Record-Courier reported. Officers then chased him on foot before taking him into custody, according to the report.
The pursuit and crash led to felony charges that took more than a year to work through Portage County's court system. A charging-period report from that same week, cited by Yahoo News, described Lewis facing a third-degree felony count of failure to comply and listed him as 42; the Record-Courier sentencing report later listed him as 43.
Guilty Plea Narrows the Charges
Lewis pleaded guilty on Aug. 3 to failure to comply with a police order or signal, vehicular assault and resisting arrest, the Record-Courier reported. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dismissed a fifth-degree felony count of obstructing official business that had been part of the original indictment.
Ohio's failure-to-comply statute, Ohio Revised Code Section 2921.331, bars drivers from ignoring a lawful order from an officer directing or controlling traffic, and separately prohibits willfully eluding or fleeing police after receiving a visible or audible signal to stop. Those are the kinds of allegations that anchored the case against Lewis before it reached its resolution this week.
Police pursuits that end in injury have drawn scrutiny elsewhere in Ohio in recent months. A man who injured four Akron police officers by hitting their cruisers also pleaded guilty to vehicular assault charges, according to WHIO. Beyond Ohio, a Washington, D.C. defendant received a 28-month sentence in a case involving a high-speed flight from law enforcement that ended in a crash into a police cruiser, per the U.S. Department of Justice.
With sentencing now complete, Lewis will spend more than two years in prison over the pursuit and crash, and his driver's license has been suspended for seven years.
